Gil Scott-Heron is a poet who rose to fame from his spoken word performances of the '70s and '80s.

A Scott-Heron, Brian Jackson composition, “Winter in America” was first released on the 1975 studio album “The First Minute of a New Day.” The song’s tone is cynical about the state of democracy in the United States, where it is “rag-time on the corner.” It laments the effects of industrialization and pollution with images of a “forest buried beneath [a] highway” and “barren treetops.”

This is Gil Scott-Heron and his Amnesia Express on March 14, 1990 in London.